The invention relates to a data management mechanism which can be used for example to combine a project plan and documentation.
A project plan is typically drawn up by a team headed by a project manager or some other coordinator. A project plan is managed for example locally by a personal computer or by a planning system on a shared server. The plan is displayed to the other participants for example via a data network. In a well organized system documents and files related to the project are gathered into servers or databases either in a centralized manner or selectively according to different spheres of responsibility. The documentation related to the project is thus available to everybody for example via the Internet. A project plan can also be published similarly as other documents.
The Internet and WWW technology with their standards allow data systems of companies to communicate with corresponding systems of subcontractors and clients. This means that an ever-increasing complex can operate in a fully electrical form. One and the same project, such as a project for designing a complicated product, may involve several dozens of individual companies (subcontractors, suppliers, consultants, the client, etc.) or parts of a big conglomerate in the subcontracting chain.
Manufacturers provide several commercial software products and systems for both project management and management of documents and data. Examples of project management programs include Microsoft® Project (Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash., USA) and Primavera® Project Planner (Primavera Systems Inc., Philadelphia, Pa., USA). Examples of document and data management software include Kronodoc (Single Source Oy, Espoo, Finland), OpenText-Livelink (OpenTextCorp., Waterloo, Ontario, Canada), SherpaWORKS (Sherpa Corp., Milpitas, Calif., USA), and CADIM/EDB (Eigner+Partner AG, Karlsruhe, Germany). Several software suppliers supplement their systems with interfaces that are based either partly or entirely on the Internet and WWW technology, thus easily providing worldwide operation of the system.
Project planning and management and, on the other hand, management of documents related to the project are separate processes carried out by means of information technology. This is evident particularly in decentralized projects with a plurality of participants, such as subcontractors, suppliers, a client, a consultant, etc. The software related to project management and the software for managing documents also operate differently.
Project plans and data related to project schedules are often displayed graphically, and the people processing the plans and the data are accustomed to considering a project as a series of tasks and inter-dependencies between them. Regardless of whether a project planning system operates in a local computer or in a decentralized manner in a server, the graphic outlay of the project schedule is often a Gantt or Pert chart or some other presentation which is arranged for example according to geographical location or schedule and which shows a limited amount of data related to project tasks and their interdependencies.
Management of project data and documents is usually arranged into hierarchical folders according to the product structure or in some other manner, each folder storing the documents and data related to the corresponding part of the product. Such a principle is applied most often in file management systems of both a local computer and a shared server, and also in known systems for storing documents and other data. Documents and other data can be arranged simultaneously into several hierarchical structures for example according to attributes provided in their identification data.
Due to the complicated problems involved and the different operating principles of the programs, it is difficult to form an overall picture of a project since the time dependence of the project and the documents related to the project contents cannot be viewed as a single logical entity. An unclear overall picture results in such problems as underutilization of resources, failed schedules, etc. A person using information related to the project finds it difficult for example to employ different applications and user interfaces for project and document management with no synergy between them.
European Patent 209,907 discloses a user interface which enables the input of data simultaneously into two different economic applications, such as financial management and inventory management. The underlying problem of the present invention is the opposite of the problem disclosed in the aforementioned patent. The present invention aims at solving the following problem: how to provide users with data extracted from databases and related to project and document management by utilizing synergy between different applications and thus reducing the amount of routine work with a terminal and the likelihood of human errors.